To Fear Is Human
by Damion Starr
Summary: You can suppress fear, but you can't erase it, no matter how hard you try."


To Fear Is Human

Author's Note: Slightly slashy if you squint. (But, then again, what else would you expect from moi?) Told from John's POV.

Disclaimer: Yep, Stargate: Atlantis, still not mine...and that may be for the best...

I was surprised to find him on the balcony in the middle of the night. I was even more surprised to find him on the balcony, in the middle of the night, shaking. He didn't hear me when I stepped out into the night air with him, or when the door closed behind me, and I didn't let him know that I was there right away. I just kind of stood there and watched him.

His back was to me and he was leaning against the railing. His shoulders were hunched and, yep, shaking. Not crying shaking, just...shaking.

"Lieutenant?"

He nearly jumped out of his skin and spun around. "Major! You scared me," I walked over to the railing and copied his previous position.

"Sorry. Thought you heard me,"

He eventually calmed down and resumed his relaxed posture, but I could see that he was still shaking. "Guess I was in my own world,"

I looked at his face as he looked in the opposite direction, finding something interesting about the ocean surrounding Atlantis. "Are you okay?" I finally asked.

"Yeah, fine, why?" He glanced over at me briefly before looking back out at the horizon. Liar.

"Because you're shaking,"

He fixed me with a gaze that was half "what-are-you-nuts?" and half "how-did-you-know?". Apparently, he didn't know if he should lie again, or just come clean.

"Hold out your hands," I wasn't going to give him the chance to lie. He held out his hands, palms down, and , sure enough, they were trembling. He quickly closed them into fists and returned them to his sides.

"It happens a lot," He refused to look up at me.

"Do you know why?" He couldn't have some sort of disease, could he?

"Uh, yeah," He turned away from me and leaned against the railing again, but his posture was not relaxed. "In the corps, they teach you to suppress fear. That's the only way you can keep a clear head in the field...but that's just the thing. They teach you to _suppress_ it, not erase it entirely. That you can't do, no matter how much you try," He sighed heavily and looked down at his feet. "The thing about fear is, eventually, it comes out some other way, usually once you've returned to your barracks. Some guys throw up, some guys cry, and some guys, like me, just...shake," He stood up straight, but only looked out at the ocean. "Everytime we came back from a mission, especially a really bad one, me and the rest of my team would spend the next day just dealing with fear in our own way, and not looking at each other," Finally, he looked over at me. I hated the haunted sort of look in his eyes. "We were too ashamed to look at each other, to see the men we worked and trained with at their weakest,"

"Jesus," I breathed. It was all I could say. He looked away, and I moved closer to him. "I didn't know," I finally said dumbly. He smiled wanly.

"Yeah, well, it's not exactly something we're proud of," His weak smile quickly vanished.

"...It's okay to be scared, you know," I found myself reaching out to touch his shoulder, but he quickly turned on me, taking a step away.

"No, it's not!" I blinked at his sudden mood change. "Fear causes mistakes, and mistakes cause deaths!"

That had been drilled into his head, it was obvious. As he said it, his eyes lacked the conviction that they would have had he believed it.

"No," I said quietly, moving toward him once more. "Everyone is afraid of something, Lieutenant, and no one expects you to be fearless when facing down a Wraith," He looked at the floor, breathing heavily, but said and did nothing. I continued to move toward him. "This isn't the Marines. This is the SGC. This isn't even Earth. It's an alien planet, and an alien galaxy," I stopped inches away from him. He slowly looked up at me. "It's okay to be afraid, Aiden, because that means you're human, and being human could save us in the future. It's saved us in the past," It didn't even occur to me until later that I'd used first name, but calling him "Lieutenant" or "Ford" at the time seemed...wrong.

"I'm sorry," He whispered.

"You have nothing to be sorry for," He gave me a smile that was a ghost of his normal mega-watt grin, but it was an improvement. "You know that you can talk to me anytime about anything, right?" He just nodded.


End file.
